If I was interested in escaping politics, the Vineyard was not the place to go.
Glenn was playing golf with President Obama, while Hillary was working nonstop raising money. She and Bill were going to afternoon barbecues and nighttime clambakes, any place where the donors might be gathering. I was impressed with her energy. I heard about her comings and goings from my sweet little guest apartment at Glenn’s place, where I was hoping to tune out the world of campaigning.
Truth was that I was as eager to get out of DC as everyone else was. I wanted to shake off that frightening FBI briefing by getting far away from its shadows. By the middle of the month, I had sent all the letters to inform our donors and others, as required by forty-seven states, about the cyberbreach at the DNC.
After our meeting with the FBI, I appreciated what Ray said about wanting to live in a world where you didn’t know all the terrible things that were happening around you. Unfortunately, as the chair of the DNC, I could not live in such a world. I knew I could not tell anyone what we had heard in that briefing, except for the fact that the Bureau was certain that this cyberattack had not stopped. If Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear were still trying to penetrate the DNC computers, my mind spun the various other nefarious ways they might be trying to mess with our democracy and throw the election to Donald Trump. Were there spies on the streets following our staffers? Were there moles inside the DNC building? Now that I was the chair, did they have their sights set on me?
In the days before I left for Martha’s Vineyard, I could not seem to get away from the crisis that had started at the convention and continued through the month of August. Every night when I went home Patrice Taylor, the DNC’s director of party affairs, gave me a list of people to apologize to about the hacking. I’d start around 7 p.m. when I opened a bottle of wine and sat on my couch to dial, starting with the people on the East Coast and moving west across the country with the setting of the sun.
I had my apology speech down to about ten minutes. I’m sorry that it’s taken so long for me to call you and apologize for the fact that your data was compromised. We are going to do everything we can to protect your identity in the future. We’re going to notify you officially as is required by law, but the party is taking extra steps to make sure that this does not happen again. I’ve created a cybersecurity task force, and our system is up and working again. I want you to know we have not just put a Band-Aid on this, but a tourniquet to make our system safe going forward. And again I want to apologize for all the trouble that we have caused you and your family.
Most of the donors I contacted were grateful that I called, so I kept doing it, putting in fourteen-hour workdays, in the hope that this personal touch from the party chair would make them less inclined to sue us. It was exhausting to end every day this way, but it was important, and it was sincere. By the time I left for Martha’s Vineyard, we estimated I had apologized to four hundred big donors.
In the week after the FBI briefing and my “Gentlemen” outburst on the conference call with Brooklyn, Charlie Baker and Minyon Moore from the Clinton campaign came to town and we had lunch. I wanted to explain to them my vision for what the party could do to help build enthusiasm for a Hillary win, if Brooklyn would only let loose of some of the money that was washing through the DNC.
The campaign was raising millions of dollars through the DNC, and because of the agreement they had made to pay off the party’s debt I could not touch a cent. The states were raising money, too, but that money was not under the states’ control, either. All of this was in the hands of Robby Mook, who wanted to maintain control of all the funds and spend them in the way that he saw fit. Hence Brandon dogging my every step, to see to it that I did not get some crazy idea that I could be independent and follow my instincts about what the states needed and when. I chafed against these restraints, and it offended them when I expressed this frustration. This was confirmation of what I had gleaned from my interactions with Brooklyn. They did not like the fact that I trusted my gut and made decisions based on it.
Their focus in Brooklyn was raising a billion dollars to get to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election. They were less interested in helping the down-ballot races unless the money flowed through to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to elect members of Congress. Brooklyn’s idea seemed to be that the coattails of Hillary’s victory would sweep all the grateful candidates into office as a great wind was at the party’s back. I knew enough about the grassroots to understand that was a myth. The candidate at the top benefits from the energy at the bottom of the ticket, the state and local races that build excitement, a sense that we are all part of the team that is sweeping forward to victory. If you neglect those races, not only do you lose an opportunity to foster the next generation of candidates, you just might lose the whole damn election.
Over lunch, Charlie and Minyon said that I should take this up with Robby, but I knew that would not be a good conversation. You know, you cannot leave me in a room with a bunch of smartass white boys for ten minutes before it all starts to go wrong. I knew Charlie and Minyon heard me, but it was also clear that there was not much that they could do.
The hacks and the DNC’s finances weren’t my only problem. I just escaped the massive storm that drenched my home state when I flew to Dallas on that night of August 10, but in the week that followed I was dealing with the aftermath. On the eleventh the storms gathered in the area around Baton Rouge and Lafayette and hovered there for eighteen hours. The torrential rain of two or three inches an hour dumped three times as much water as Katrina had. Thirty-one inches of rain fell in a single day. The weather service said in all the storm had released 7.1 trillion gallons, enough to fill Lake Pontchartrain about four times; Katrina had drenched my home state with 2.3 trillion gallons.
Most of my family is in Louisiana. Katrina changed their lives. Some ran, some had to be rescued, and all of them were displaced. I felt a huge responsibility not just to help them but to help the state. Gov. Kathleen Blanco asked me to be part of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, and during those years I was in and out of the Bush White House as often as I had been when Bill Clinton lived there. I felt a moral obligation to help the entire people of Louisiana, not just my family, to rebuild. Eleven years after Katrina, when the state was getting back on its feet, here was this no-name storm to knock it back on its heels again.
So while I was supposed to be relaxing in the comfortable rocking chairs on Glenn’s porch on Martha’s Vineyard, I was on my phone and iPad communicating with FEMA and with the president’s staff about the record flooding in Baton Rouge, making sure that resources were going to the places where they were needed, and fielding calls and messages from hundreds of people in my extended circle who were trapped or displaced by the flooding of ten rivers. And into the middle of all this walked the Damn Duck.
Evidently someone in a Donald Duck costume kept showing up at Donald Trump’s campaign rallies calling him out for ducking the release of his taxes. Ha ha. With all the noise and confusion and flat-out fear of this campaign, the duck did not surface to the level of my other concerns until one of my bosses at ABC emailed me. The message was titled, “I hate to bother you on your time off…” and it read: “BUT—Richard Bates of the Walt Disney Company is trying to reach you about the DNC’s using Donald Duck. He is desperate.” Then the phone rang, and it was Robin Sproul, the DC bureau chief from ABC News.
“Donna, you have got to stop using the duck,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the Clinton campaign and the DNC are using Donald Duck at these Trump events,” Robin said.
“No we’re not. I didn’t approve that,” I said.
I looked online to see what she was referring to and suddenly I was seeing that duck everywhere: in Los Angeles, in Charlotte, North Carolina, and even one going down the escalator in Trump Tower, just as the other Donald had to announce his candidacy. This d
uck got around! The Damn Duck was even issuing press releases, questioning if Trump was not releasing his tax returns because he was not as rich as he was claiming to be, or didn’t really donate to charity, or didn’t pay any taxes. And press reports said that Donald Duck was from the DNC, intending to follow Trump wherever he appeared to heckle him for not releasing his taxes.
I sat on the porch at Glenn’s looking out toward Katama Bay, stunned by the idiocy of whoever thought this was a good idea. I have never been a big fan of people dressing up in animal costumes to make a political point. This was not the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and it was not Mardi Gras, either. I’d been chair for less than a month, but I thought I’d taken control of all these different factions and finally calmed things down. Here was evidence that I still had to resolve many ongoing things lest the party continue to be embarrassed by these amateur stunts. Donald Duck is owned by Disney, which owns ABC. In addition to all the other trouble the party was in, we just might have a trademark infringement case on our hands. I had to stop the Damn Duck.
“A duck?” I said to Glenn Hutchins. “How the hell did a duck get past me?”
So I called Patrice at the office. She said she would have someone from the press office call me, because they had been coordinating it.
“You mean we have a duck?” I asked. “We have a duck! Why do we have a duck?”
I hate the duck. When I was a kid people used to call me Daffy because my name was Donna. I don’t want no damned duck, and now Richard Bates, the ABC vice president of government affairs is calling me. I called the DC office again.
“Kill the damn duck!” I said. “Kill the fucking duck, goddammit!
“Why are you worrying about the duck?”
“I hate the duck!”
The idea that the campaign—and as far as I knew it was not the DNC—was paying someone to follow Donald Trump around in a duck costume struck me as the opposite of what we should be doing to keep the focus on Hillary’s strengths as a candidate. And, by the way, was this not proof of paid protestors? Every time Donald Trump made the claim that we were paying people to protest his rallies, we denied it furiously. That was just not something that the Democrats would ever do, and then here was the Damn Duck. I started emailing up the ladder at the campaign to get to someone in a decision-making role to fix this, but the first person to respond was Brandon.
Brandon said this was no problem. The campaign and DNC lawyers had signed off on it and besides we had not heard anything from Disney.
The reason I was emailing was because we had heard from Disney.
I was sitting on the porch of this beautiful home hearing the soothing sound of the ocean just a few hundred feet away but I was spending all my energy on this duck. Glenn was part owner of the Boston Celtics, and inside the house in the kitchen were three very fine-looking basketball players making me breakfast, and I was out here where the WiFi signal was best, trying to get someone to pay attention to the risk posed by this Damn Duck. I was supposed to appear on that panel about the presidential race in a few hours, but I could not settle in and focus on the comments I was going to make. Who could I get to kill the Damn Duck?
By the afternoon I had made some progress in convincing some of the campaign leaders and lawyers that the duck had to go, so I could concentrate on making my case for Hillary at the panel, but the duck was always in the back of my mind. I sat at the front of the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown, my iPad on the table in front of me so I could follow the updates the Obama administration was sending me about its response to the storm. I was in touch with the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of Baton Rouge as well as with FEMA. In between notifications from them, I was getting distracted by messages about the Damn Duck.
By the next morning I got a call from Charlie Baker wanting to know why I was worried about the duck.
“Charlie, because I’m still—I’m on leave from Walt Disney, which owns ABC. I’m an ABC contributor, and it’s their duck. Not my duck. Not the DNC’s duck. It’s their duck and they do not want us to use the duck. Please stop using the fucking duck.”
I hung up the phone and looked online where I saw they were using the duck at a noon Trump event.
I’m slow to anger, very slow, but once I am angry, get out of Delores’s way. I called Marc Elias, the lawyer for the Hillary campaign, and told him that I had heard from ABC and Disney about the duck and he had to kill it.
“The duck is the intellectual property of Disney. They could sue us, okay? Do you want that story out there? Hillary’s about to go to California to raise money and she’s going to see Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, who is holding this fund-raiser, and this is coming from him. What do you want to do? Have him cancel the fund-raiser? I know you all want that money. So get rid of the fucking duck!”
“Donna, this was Hillary’s decision to use the duck,” he said. He explained a close friend had suggested it to Hillary and she thought it was a great idea. Apparently someone wanted to use Uncle Sam but Hillary’s friend vetoed that, saying a duck was a lot funnier.
Was he kidding? He was not. What a brilliant decision! Can someone get this message to her? Is she the only one who can kill the Damn Duck?
Marc Elias was the man to call. By noon he had killed the duck once and for all, and the next morning I was able to enjoy my breakfast with the NBA. I enjoyed it very much, in fact.
After breakfast I was sitting on the porch with Glenn getting his advice for how to deal with the constant cyberattacks and the lack of response from Brooklyn. Meanwhile I was happy to see that the problems in the Trump campaign were all over the news. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had been forced to resign due to his questionable ties to Russia and Ukraine. In politics, when a campaign says that such and such a thing has become a distraction, what they mean is that the person is a liability. Manafort, according to an investigation by the New York Times, had taken nearly $13 million from a pro-Russian political party in the Ukraine to help swing the election its way. For all of Trump’s finger-pointing about “Crooked Hillary,” he had ethical issues of his own in his campaign, and they were tied to the Russians. Wait a minute, I thought. The Russians were in Trump’s campaign operation, too? If they were, it seemed they were not operating in the same way they were in the DNC.
As distracting as the development was, I had donors to meet. That was my other task on Martha’s Vineyard. I was doing the grip and grin, meeting in advance with donors before Hillary arrived to get the audience excited about the campaign. They all wanted a personal update from a party leader about what was going on inside the campaign
Here’s how these events work. As you stand in this beautifully groomed backyard next to huge platters of steaks, lobsters, and clams, you get interrogated by the high-dollar donors who pepper you with questions about what the party intends to do about the issue they consider to be the most important. How you respond to these questions about climate change and the Trans-Pacific Partnership determines the amount these donors will give. These are smart people who know a tremendous amount about the subject they’re questioning you on, so you cannot give vague answers. You have to be on your toes. You also have to look confident and casual and show that you are not manipulating or hiding anything.
After I did my warm-up act, the crowd was prepared for the arrival of the star. Hillary looked great, even though I knew from experience how exhausting this work is. She was doing three of these on some days: a brunch in the late morning, a barbecue in the afternoon, and a dinner at sunset. I started to get worried that she was pushing herself too hard, but I know she felt a huge responsibility to win this election. She had been given this chance to be the first woman president, and she was determined to keep up this incredible pace of her campaign.
While I was making the rounds at these fund-raisers, Donald Trump was speaking to a big crowd of supporters in Michigan when he decided to address the African American community. He told the crowd that the Democrats were taking the minority vot
e for granted in this election and that the lives of people of color had not improved much at all under Democratic rule.
“No group in America has been more harmed by Hillary Clinton’s policies than African Americans,” he said to the cheering crowd. “If Hillary Clinton’s goal was to inflict pain on the African American community, she could not have done a better job. It’s a disgrace. Tonight I’m asking for the vote of every single African American citizen in this country who wants a better future… Look how much African American communities have suffered under Democratic control. To those I say the following: What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose? I say it again: What do you have to lose? You’re living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”
The nerve of this guy to call out Hillary, a woman who has worked all her life for children, for fairness in the workplace, and against discrimination, while he led a company that had allegedly prevented black people from renting apartments in its buildings, and been sued by the federal government.
Yet it was impossible to refute him with facts. While Hillary, with her packed schedule of fund-raisers, soldiered on, the campaign issued a statement that listed all the ways in which Trump had taunted Obama about his birthplace and the housing discrimination in the Trump buildings. It was a dry and stiff response to a man who was an expert in playing with the emotions of despair. No one had asked me to help the campaign craft a response that would have been more suited to the audience that I knew so well. Ignoring me felt like another blow. We were almost a month into my time as chair, and Brooklyn had not included me on any of the national campaign strategy calls. I had always included the DNC chair on mine when I managed Gore’s campaign. It hurt to be cut out of those.
Thankfully I had a visit with my friend Elaine Kamarck in her home on Cape Cod, which would help soothe my soul.
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